Poland’s Parliament Fails Again to Pass Its Crypto Law

WARSAW — For the third time, Poland’s lower house could not pass the law meant to bring the country in line with Europe’s crypto rulebook. On Friday the Sejm failed to override President Karol Nawrocki’s veto of the Crypto-Asset Market Act, reaching 241 votes against the 266 required. Prime Minister Donald Tusk had pushed the re-vote; it fell 25 short.

The effect is stasis. Poland still has no domestic framework implementing the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regime, so Polish firms that deal in bitcoin must register their activities in other member states to operate legally — passporting their way around their own government.

A scandal sitting under the vote

The deadlock is inseparable from the collapse of Zondacrypto, once the country’s largest exchange, which prosecutors say lost up to $94 million in customer funds. Its former chief executive, Przemyslaw Kral, left for Israel as a fraud probe widened; the head of the Polish Olympic Committee, Radoslaw Piesiewicz, was detained in the related corruption investigation. Nawrocki vetoed the act citing risks to Poles’ “freedom and stability.” Tusk accused the president’s camp of having ushered Zondacrypto’s owners “to the very highest echelons of power.” The bill became a proxy for that fight.

Why bitcoin holders should care

Most of the drama is about a custodial exchange and a political brawl, not bitcoin itself. But the fallout lands on legitimate bitcoin businesses. Without a domestic MiCA law, a Polish exchange, broker, or custody provider faces a choice between registering abroad, restricting service, or operating in a gray zone — while neighbors with clean frameworks compete for the same customers. A scandal about one failed platform has frozen the rules for all of them.

A scandal about one failed exchange has frozen the rules for every bitcoin business in the country.

What happens next

With the override defeated a third time, the act returns to political limbo. Tusk’s government can keep trying, but the arithmetic has not moved, and the Zondacrypto investigation will keep the subject radioactive. For Poland’s bitcoin sector, the near-term reality is the workaround: build the business under another country’s license and wait for Warsaw to settle its own argument.

Why it matters: clear rules are infrastructure, and a country that cannot pass them exports its own bitcoin industry to the ones that can.